ACCELERATED HYBRID HIGH FREQUENCY TECHNIQUES FOR EFFICIENT MODELING OF ELECTROMAGNETIC SCATTERING FROM ELECTRICALLY LARGE OBJECTS IN FREE SPACE, HALF SPACE AND ABOVE ROUGH SURFACES

Abstract

Efficient modeling of electromagnetic scattering from electrically large and complex objects in the presence of environment, such as terrain and ocean, is essential many applications, such as remote sensing and rapid prototyping. For the objects of thousands of wavelengths in size, full wave methods require huge computational resources which are often inaccessible to many. On the contrary, hybrid high frequency methods trade a little accuracy to enable efficient simulation on commodity hardware. We emphasize the combination of half space Green’s function and graphics processing unit (GPU) to improve the accuracy of hybrid high frequency methods while maintaining the efficiency. Collectively, Physical optics (PO) method, shooting and bouncing rays (SBR), and physical theory of diffraction (PTD) approximately account for the electromagnetic scattering from the object. This thesis discusses the specialized algorithmic implementation of these techniques for two types of analyses: radar cross section (RCS) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging.